Dr David Rudrum

Biography

David Rudrum joined the English team at the University of Huddersfield in the summer of 2006. Previously, he taught at London Metropolitan University, at the University of London (in both Goldsmiths College and Royal Holloway College), and at the Open University. He was awarded his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London for a study entitled Wittgenstein and the Theory of Narrative.

David has edited a book of essays entitled Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates (Palgrave: 2006), and a dozen or so articles in various scholarly books and journals. His first publication sparked a rather heated controversy with the distinguished narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan (see the journal Narrative, 2005-6). He is also a director of the Elmet Trust, an organisation dedicated to promoting the legacy and preserving the birthplace of the late poet laureate Ted Hughes.

Likes: the prose of Joseph Conrad; the plays of Samuel Beckett; the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein; the taste of a very fine Scotch whisky; the smell of napalm in the morning.
Dislikes: Pointless bureaucracy; mushrooms; structuralism; cats.

Research & Scholarship

I've published in a variety of journals, and have presented research papers in Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and Malaysia. My research interests range across many areas, but most of them can be grouped under the following broad headings:

modernism, postmodernism, and the novel;

the interdisciplinary relations between literature and philosophy;

the various forms and theories of narrative.

I'm currently working on a book-length study of the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, focusing on his writings on literature. This takes in a range of topics from Wordsworth to Beckett, from Shakespeare to Poe, and from tragedy to deconstruction (which are more closely linked than you might at first think).

Other work in progress focuses on the common ground between philosophers of the early twentieth century (Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger) and novelists of the same period (Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Mann, Nathanael West, Gide, Celine and others). I'm trying to map out similarities between the ways philosophers conceptualise the idea of the self, and the ways novelists go about representing it.